There were changes that I thought were fine and added to the movies. There were clearly places where they added details that were likely only left out originally because of budget or technical constraints. There were a couple of "beauty shots" of the X-Wings on their way to the Death Star that were a really nice addition, for instance. And fixing little mistakes, etc., is something I would whole-heartedly support. Or how the Emperor originally appeared like some weird bug-eyed muppet. Changing that was a good improvement.
Of course, there were a lot of additions that were just dumb, or worse ("Greedo shot first" being probably the most heinous). Aside from all the other reasons people hate the change, I think one of the most ridiculous doesn't even get mentioned... Han Solo's head is missed by a blaster bolt hitting inches away and he doesn't even blink.
I thought the theory was much stronger with Yoda as the undercover Sith, but in either case, it would have been an instance of a character being revealed to be to someone radically different than we realized, which underscored many of the best plot points of the original trilogy, but were starky (in comparison) absent from the sequels, unless you count Padme's "stunt double" and I don't. That added nothing to the story and could only have served to confuse viewers.
Yeah, the Ewoks were too cutesy-poo and clearly there for kid-appeal, but if they'd been replaced by Wookiees, which I believe they were supposed to be originally, it would not have fundamentally changed the story. We might have has some better action scenes, but I don't think the movie would have been significantly different.
On the other hand, without Jar Jar, the prequels would have changed significantly. Frankly, I never disliked Jar Jar as much as most people and I don't resent the idea of the character, just some of the execution. In a ranked list of reasons I didn't like the prequels, from biggest to smallest, Jar Jar probably wouldn't even make it on to first page.
Firefox might run faster, but you might also get webpages from an alternate reality. Of course, that could be good, too, because you might find a better Firefox.
I guess you're not familiar with Rifftrax, because the "aging" Mike, Kevin and Bill are doing quite well for themselves.
Furthermore, the show will now have a completely different cast. I think it's an incredible opportunity to see what a whole new crew of people can do under the guidance and aegis of the guy who created the whole concept in the first place.
Sit it out if you want, but don't bash it until you've given it a chance.
Seeing as how you are someone who is praising "Family Guy", I find it really difficult to give any credit to your ability to judge what's good or not.
I think it's foolish to rule out the show just because Mike, Bill and Kevin aren't involved. Maybe the new episodes won't be very good, or maybe they'll be better than ever. Either way, we'll still have Rifftrax. There's room in this world for more than one franchise making fun of bad movies.
Except Joel Hodgson and Shout! Factory aren't Hollywood fat cats. Shout! has been very good to the show, working to make most of the episodes available for purchase, and they are now re-releasing the Rhino-era episodes which have been out of print for some time. Having secured the intellectual property from Jim Mallon, they are willing to give Joel the kind of control that made MST3K the best TV ever in the first place.
And Joel... we're still talking about the guy who started the whole franchise with a skeleton crew on a no-name UHF station with almost zero budget. Even if the new episodes aren't as good as the old ones, I sincerely believe that Joel and the new cast, writers and producers will give it their all.
I also don't see it as any kind of slam against the new project that Mike, Bill and Kevin have chosen not to be involved. Mike and Kevin were involved with the original show for about 10 years each, and Bill for about 3 years. They made wonderful contributions, but they have their own gig now. They have a good thing going with Rifftrax, which itself has been going for the better part of 10 years, and works from a significantly different business model that must be pretty successful given the amount of material they are able to produce. Rifftrax has clearly declared its alliance with the new MST3K and will be selling the new episodes, along with the old episodes it's already selling. Plus, Mary Jo and Bridget are now riffing for Rifftrax in their own unique style.
It's a big enough world for more than one franchise making fun of bad movies. Who knows... maybe ICWXP will hit it big next!
I hear you. Up until Windows 7, I enjoyed the "Windows Classic" theme, because I think the Windows 2000, while dated-looking, was also the cleanest and most function UI skin Microsoft ever made. Everything since then has been some degree or other of ugly, with Windows 8 and 10 being the worst-looking versions of Windows since Windows 2, which mostly suffered from the lack of hardware capabilties (low resolution, low color depth).
It seems that everything that was meticulously studied and developed back in the 80s by people like IBM and Microsoft themselves (like CUA), has been thrown out of the window with no guiding principles replacing them other than what a bunch of pajama boys with art degrees and no real-world experience think looks good. This has been going on for almost 20 years (the quality of UI started to decline in the late 90s when everyone went way overboard with skeuomorphic design and you could no longer tell what was a control and what was background ornamentation. Windows 8 went for some kind of minimalist look where large swaths of blank space on the screen seemed to be the guiding principle, not unlike 90s grunge music, which cast off all the excesses of 80s pop, with the over-reliance of synthesizers and excessive production, but along with the grunge movement, MS also threw out the baby with the bathwater, and forgot to make what was left good.
So now we have the Gnome mentality where choice is bad for you because apparently all users are stupid, as opposed to the truth, which is that a lot of users are inexperienced and unsophisticated, but plenty of users can and want to control as much as they can. For instance, I tried the OneDrive app for Android and like Windows, it doesn't show file extensions by default, which I think is the stupidest usability mistake MS ever made, except in the case of the Android app, there's no way to turn it on, so I'm reduced to deciphering icons to figure out what the hell kind of file I'm looking at. The application intentionally cripples the user by removing important information.
And don't get me started on Amazon, who are much, much worse than MS. MS may have forgotten how to make a good UI, but Amazon never knew in the first place, and it shows in their software UI. (I'm referring to their software... their website isn't bad, IMO).
Yeah, I was going to make a similar comment. Microsoft seems to have really improved on the security front... too bad no one wants to use their software any more. Usability seems to have gone by the wayside, along with any aesthetic sense. Windows is now uglier than it's been since Windows 2.
Yeah, I chose my name around 1986 as well. I can't take credit for making it up, but I've been using it for almost 30 years. The sad thing is that I missed out on grabbing the.com domain name.
Watching a funny guy snark about a movie ONLY he is forced to watch isn't as funny because -- why would you do that? What's the point again? What else is on?
It's funny because it's _very_ funny, funnier than anyone else can do at snarking on bad movies.
I was feeling disappointed looking through all the comments at how many people were misspelling Forrest Mims' name. I mean, it's right there at the top of the page, for crying out loud.
Oops, then I realized that it was misspelled there, too. Thanks, Slashdot editors. You are really doing a top-notch job.
Wow. wombat. You're the one who is deflecting and doing it very well with your "life unworthy of life" arguments.
By your logic, it should be OK to kill kids who are already born because a lot of parents abuse them through poisoning (second-hand smoke, feeding them too much junk food, etc), plus all kinds of other abuse like sexual abuse, emotional abuse, slavery, playing One Direction music for them, or teaching them BASIC.
Just think how much suffering we could eliminate if we could just put these poor kids out of their misery. And why must it stop with kids? There's massive starvation, disease and misery in many parts of the world, but if we nuke those places to glass we will eliminate _so_ much suffering. Most of these folks are just doing to die in pain, and we wouldn't want to allow that.
You warm up the bombers and I'll look up the nuclear football codes. Meet back here in 10.
At the sites I've voted the default choice has been, since the 90s or so, that you get a scantron form and fill out dots with a felt marker. The forms are very simple and clear. None of this butterfly nonsense or anything like the ridiculous schemes we also saw in Florida in 2000. The form is then fed into a machine and the votes are presumably optically counted, and of course, the original hard copies can be maintained for recounts, etc. It always seemed to me to be a reasonable and secure way to run an election.
I'm always asked if I want to use the electronic machines... which I think are mostly kept around for people with special needs, and I always respond that I wouldn't trust the electronic voting machines as far as I could throw them. More than once, I was answered with a knowing smirk, as if the voting official knew what I meant and agreed.
It turns a parliament into a collection of many small parties with extremist viewpoints and unstable, unpredictable coalitions.
As opposed to what we have in the U.S. now, which is two giant monolithic parties who don't really represent anyone except their own politicians' desire to maintain the status quo.
The United States of America will still exist in 30-40 years?
Did you perhaps mean instead the New Confederate States of America? The Republic of Texas? The Free Republic of Idaho? Mexarkana? Absaroka? The Jefferson Freehold? New Deseret? The Republic of Sequoyah?
The reason socialism is gaining traction in the American electorate is that the level of ignorance has reached the point where the average voter isn't aware that TANSTAAFL.
Slashdot Mirror
There were changes that I thought were fine and added to the movies. There were clearly places where they added details that were likely only left out originally because of budget or technical constraints. There were a couple of "beauty shots" of the X-Wings on their way to the Death Star that were a really nice addition, for instance. And fixing little mistakes, etc., is something I would whole-heartedly support. Or how the Emperor originally appeared like some weird bug-eyed muppet. Changing that was a good improvement.
Of course, there were a lot of additions that were just dumb, or worse ("Greedo shot first" being probably the most heinous). Aside from all the other reasons people hate the change, I think one of the most ridiculous doesn't even get mentioned... Han Solo's head is missed by a blaster bolt hitting inches away and he doesn't even blink.
I thought the theory was much stronger with Yoda as the undercover Sith, but in either case, it would have been an instance of a character being revealed to be to someone radically different than we realized, which underscored many of the best plot points of the original trilogy, but were starky (in comparison) absent from the sequels, unless you count Padme's "stunt double" and I don't. That added nothing to the story and could only have served to confuse viewers.
Yeah, the Ewoks were too cutesy-poo and clearly there for kid-appeal, but if they'd been replaced by Wookiees, which I believe they were supposed to be originally, it would not have fundamentally changed the story. We might have has some better action scenes, but I don't think the movie would have been significantly different.
On the other hand, without Jar Jar, the prequels would have changed significantly. Frankly, I never disliked Jar Jar as much as most people and I don't resent the idea of the character, just some of the execution. In a ranked list of reasons I didn't like the prequels, from biggest to smallest, Jar Jar probably wouldn't even make it on to first page.
Let me guess... you like Seth Macfarlane shows.
Firefox might run faster, but you might also get webpages from an alternate reality. Of course, that could be good, too, because you might find a better Firefox.
I've been a professional software developer for almost 30 years, and I can say that this isn't new.
There has always been cookbook programming and programmers who can only do it.
I guess you're not familiar with Rifftrax, because the "aging" Mike, Kevin and Bill are doing quite well for themselves.
Furthermore, the show will now have a completely different cast. I think it's an incredible opportunity to see what a whole new crew of people can do under the guidance and aegis of the guy who created the whole concept in the first place.
Sit it out if you want, but don't bash it until you've given it a chance.
Seeing as how you are someone who is praising "Family Guy", I find it really difficult to give any credit to your ability to judge what's good or not.
I think it's foolish to rule out the show just because Mike, Bill and Kevin aren't involved. Maybe the new episodes won't be very good, or maybe they'll be better than ever. Either way, we'll still have Rifftrax. There's room in this world for more than one franchise making fun of bad movies.
Except Joel Hodgson and Shout! Factory aren't Hollywood fat cats. Shout! has been very good to the show, working to make most of the episodes available for purchase, and they are now re-releasing the Rhino-era episodes which have been out of print for some time. Having secured the intellectual property from Jim Mallon, they are willing to give Joel the kind of control that made MST3K the best TV ever in the first place.
And Joel... we're still talking about the guy who started the whole franchise with a skeleton crew on a no-name UHF station with almost zero budget. Even if the new episodes aren't as good as the old ones, I sincerely believe that Joel and the new cast, writers and producers will give it their all.
I also don't see it as any kind of slam against the new project that Mike, Bill and Kevin have chosen not to be involved. Mike and Kevin were involved with the original show for about 10 years each, and Bill for about 3 years. They made wonderful contributions, but they have their own gig now. They have a good thing going with Rifftrax, which itself has been going for the better part of 10 years, and works from a significantly different business model that must be pretty successful given the amount of material they are able to produce. Rifftrax has clearly declared its alliance with the new MST3K and will be selling the new episodes, along with the old episodes it's already selling. Plus, Mary Jo and Bridget are now riffing for Rifftrax in their own unique style.
It's a big enough world for more than one franchise making fun of bad movies. Who knows... maybe ICWXP will hit it big next!
I hear you. Up until Windows 7, I enjoyed the "Windows Classic" theme, because I think the Windows 2000, while dated-looking, was also the cleanest and most function UI skin Microsoft ever made. Everything since then has been some degree or other of ugly, with Windows 8 and 10 being the worst-looking versions of Windows since Windows 2, which mostly suffered from the lack of hardware capabilties (low resolution, low color depth).
It seems that everything that was meticulously studied and developed back in the 80s by people like IBM and Microsoft themselves (like CUA), has been thrown out of the window with no guiding principles replacing them other than what a bunch of pajama boys with art degrees and no real-world experience think looks good. This has been going on for almost 20 years (the quality of UI started to decline in the late 90s when everyone went way overboard with skeuomorphic design and you could no longer tell what was a control and what was background ornamentation. Windows 8 went for some kind of minimalist look where large swaths of blank space on the screen seemed to be the guiding principle, not unlike 90s grunge music, which cast off all the excesses of 80s pop, with the over-reliance of synthesizers and excessive production, but along with the grunge movement, MS also threw out the baby with the bathwater, and forgot to make what was left good.
So now we have the Gnome mentality where choice is bad for you because apparently all users are stupid, as opposed to the truth, which is that a lot of users are inexperienced and unsophisticated, but plenty of users can and want to control as much as they can. For instance, I tried the OneDrive app for Android and like Windows, it doesn't show file extensions by default, which I think is the stupidest usability mistake MS ever made, except in the case of the Android app, there's no way to turn it on, so I'm reduced to deciphering icons to figure out what the hell kind of file I'm looking at. The application intentionally cripples the user by removing important information.
And don't get me started on Amazon, who are much, much worse than MS. MS may have forgotten how to make a good UI, but Amazon never knew in the first place, and it shows in their software UI. (I'm referring to their software... their website isn't bad, IMO).
Yeah, I was going to make a similar comment. Microsoft seems to have really improved on the security front... too bad no one wants to use their software any more. Usability seems to have gone by the wayside, along with any aesthetic sense. Windows is now uglier than it's been since Windows 2.
Yeah, I chose my name around 1986 as well. I can't take credit for making it up, but I've been using it for almost 30 years. The sad thing is that I missed out on grabbing the .com domain name.
Watching a funny guy snark about a movie ONLY he is forced to watch isn't as funny because -- why would you do that? What's the point again? What else is on?
It's funny because it's _very_ funny, funnier than anyone else can do at snarking on bad movies.
I was feeling disappointed looking through all the comments at how many people were misspelling Forrest Mims' name. I mean, it's right there at the top of the page, for crying out loud.
Oops, then I realized that it was misspelled there, too. Thanks, Slashdot editors. You are really doing a top-notch job.
and leave yours to curse your memory.
You mean they don't now? I'm better off than I thought.
So... "All your weltanschauung belong to us", huh?
I think it's an old nautical term... you know, "I like the cut of his jeb."
Wow. wombat. You're the one who is deflecting and doing it very well with your "life unworthy of life" arguments.
By your logic, it should be OK to kill kids who are already born because a lot of parents abuse them through poisoning (second-hand smoke, feeding them too much junk food, etc), plus all kinds of other abuse like sexual abuse, emotional abuse, slavery, playing One Direction music for them, or teaching them BASIC.
Just think how much suffering we could eliminate if we could just put these poor kids out of their misery. And why must it stop with kids? There's massive starvation, disease and misery in many parts of the world, but if we nuke those places to glass we will eliminate _so_ much suffering. Most of these folks are just doing to die in pain, and we wouldn't want to allow that.
You warm up the bombers and I'll look up the nuclear football codes. Meet back here in 10.
At the sites I've voted the default choice has been, since the 90s or so, that you get a scantron form and fill out dots with a felt marker. The forms are very simple and clear. None of this butterfly nonsense or anything like the ridiculous schemes we also saw in Florida in 2000. The form is then fed into a machine and the votes are presumably optically counted, and of course, the original hard copies can be maintained for recounts, etc. It always seemed to me to be a reasonable and secure way to run an election.
I'm always asked if I want to use the electronic machines... which I think are mostly kept around for people with special needs, and I always respond that I wouldn't trust the electronic voting machines as far as I could throw them. More than once, I was answered with a knowing smirk, as if the voting official knew what I meant and agreed.
It turns a parliament into a collection of many small parties with extremist viewpoints and unstable, unpredictable coalitions.
As opposed to what we have in the U.S. now, which is two giant monolithic parties who don't really represent anyone except their own politicians' desire to maintain the status quo.
I spent weeks writing a program to expand that list to 1000 items and oeis.org wouldn't accept it.
Snobs.
The United States of America will still exist in 30-40 years?
Did you perhaps mean instead the New Confederate States of America? The Republic of Texas? The Free Republic of Idaho? Mexarkana? Absaroka? The Jefferson Freehold? New Deseret? The Republic of Sequoyah?
Don't tell me. Explain that to the U.S.'s creditors. They're the ones you need to convince.
The reason socialism is gaining traction in the American electorate is that the level of ignorance has reached the point where the average voter isn't aware that TANSTAAFL.
Don't forget Termux (http://termux.com/), which gives you the shell and a whole buncha tools, including gcc, python, ruby and more.